Article taken from Time off Magazine Tuesday, March 05, 2002
Kevin Mitchell reckons his band’s second album, Of Someday Shambles, couldn’t have been more accurately titled – despite his affection for the album, it was, he says, a shambles.
But there’ll be no such regrets when Mitchell looks back on Jebediah’s new, self-titled album.
“We’re just gonna relax the fuck out and just chill the fuck out,” Mitchell says, recalling Jebediah’s first priority before entering the recording studio. “And let’s get Magoo to make our record and have a really fucking good time.”
But there was more to it than that. Mitchell, guitarist Chris Daymond, bassist Vanessa Thornton and drummer Brett Mitchell had drawn together their strongest batch of songs yet.
“Going into the record, we were really confident about our songs, far more confident than we were going into the last one,” Mitchell confirms. “We felt like the songs really captured the feeling of the time, which was being at home all through the summer, getting through that whole Shambles touring thing, and feeling good about ourselves and relaxed and happy, content with our place in the world. We wanted to really capture that vibe. I think it’s turned out all right.”
He’s not wrong. Where Jebediah’s 1997 debut Slightly Odway was infectious in its wide-eyed optimism and enthusiasm, and 1999’s Of Someday Shambles was progressive but messy, Jebediah is the album where these elements meet an effortless wave of quality. It’s the album where we’ll have to stop looking at these West Australians as a bunch of lucky kids, and start looking at them as a rock band capable of much more than quirky singles.
“[It’s got] everything from a full-on 80s country pop song, to a fucked-up, nasty, dirty punk rock song,” Mitchell continues. “[We’d] come out with all these different sounds and different styles of song. This record’s got that definitely more than anything we’ve done before. And I reckon as much for any band in Australia at the moment.”
There is no better example of all this than the album’s centrepiece, ‘Yesterday When I Was Brave’, the song which means the most to the band. Thornton has even had notes from ‘Yesterday...’ tattooed on her arm.
“My theory is it’s probably one of the few songs where we feel like we nailed everything,” Mitchell says. “When you look at all the different aspects of a song, there’s everything from the lyric writing to the melody, then you’ve got the production side of things... it’s very rare, and I hope that it’s something we can achieve one day, but it’s very rare for us to be able to put out an album where we’ve nailed everything. We’re just not that good yet; maybe we never will be. But ‘Yesterday’ is the best sounding, best mix, the lyrics touch a nerve with the band members... there’s a few lyrics on this album that are like that.”
Indeed, Jebediah is full of reminiscing.
“I suppose it’s where the culmination of all the events of my life has got me to,” Kevin explains. “So much crazy shit has happened, and everything happened so quickly, all these things had come at me from so many different angles, that I guess in five years I’d never actually got a chance to really stop and look back on everything. Thinking about the band, thinking about my Dad, thinking about the way our lives had changed over the years...
“You know, it feels like only yesterday that this band was just a little hobby, and then all of a sudden it was a career, and we’re starting a label [Redline Records], and it’s like ‘Oh, this is what you do for a living?’ [laughs]. We didn’t even see it happening. I look back and it’s like, shit, Odway was a double platinum album, and at the time I don’t think any of us really realised the significance of it, and I’m kind of glad that we didn’t, ’cos it might have turned us into monsters.”
Before reaching this happy, remember-what-we’re-in-it-for state, the Jebs went through a hard slog. They spent much of 2000 touring Of Someday Shambles through North America with scene-leading emo bands like the Get Up Kids and Jimmy Eat World.
“The problem with discovering new music while we were over there was we were so entrenched in this emo punk rock scene, that I found it really difficult to discover anything,” Mitchell says. “We discovered lots of new emo punk rock bands – we discovered lots of really good ones and lots of really shit ones.
“We were embraced by this emo scene, and that was great for us – we got to tour with Get Up Kids and Jimmy Eat World, who are two of the most respected and successful bands of that genre in America at the moment. Lots of bands are just spinning out about how we got those tours.”
When they themselves stopped spinning, Jebediah returned home to begin work on their latest album.
“We threw off the shackles that we’d put on ourselves on the last album, and all those evil thoughts that were coming into our heads,” Mitchell dramatically explains. “It was easy to have a good laugh making this record. Everything was set up for it – we had Magoo, we had an awesome studio where we slept and cooked our own meals… the whole circumstance was set up for having a good time. Actually, I can’t wait to do it again.”
Jebediah play the Sands Tavern, Maroochydore, Saturday Mar 16; Troccadero Entertainment Centre Sunday Mar 17; The Powerhouse, Toowoomba, Tuesday Mar 26; Arena Thursday Mar 28 (all-ages); Great Northern, Byron Bay, Tuesday Apr 2; and Sawtell RSL, Coffs Harbour, Wednesday Apr 3 (all-ages). Jebediah is out on Murmur/Sony.
- Neala Johnson